Hospitalist/programmer in search of the meaning of life

Creating a Blog Application Using the OpenACS Content Repository

Feb 16th, 2006

I created a very simple blog application using the OpenACS Content Repository (CR). When I say simple, I mean simple, probably to the point of being useless. I just wanted to try writing something as quickly as possible using the CR. Here’s a quick run-through of the code, in case it might help someone else understand how to use the CR. I’m not including much commentary; email me (or comment) if you’d like me to expound more.

Notes

You’ll notice that there are no SQL datamodel files. Since I’m using the CR, all of the datamodel is created by using the CR TCL API (specifically content::type::new). This package is subsite aware meaning you can install apps on multiple subsites and the data in each subsite will remain isolated from other subsites. It should uninstall itself cleanly since I’ve written callbacks for before-uninstantiate and before-uninstall.

Like I said, this is very simplistic. You can create, read, update and delete posts, but that’s about it. No commenting. No tags or categories. No RSS feeds. No search. But, since we’ve used the CR as our base, I think it would be very easy to extend the app to do all those things. I’m going to work on that, just for fun, of course. Thanks to Dave Bauer for writing the TCL interface to the CR and for writing the wiki package which made me see the light about the benefits of using the CR.